“I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.”

“I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...”

“In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.I can't say goodbye.”

“[...]i’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have [...] I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?”

“I've no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! 'The Floating Pirate City'! I don't want it! I don't want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking the victims dry. This isn't a city, Johannes; it's a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it."I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It's dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous—particularly for me, particularly now—but it's my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history … New Crobuzon," she said slowly, "is the greatest city in Bas-Lag."And coming from her, someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon's brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian."And you're telling me," she said finally, "that I've been exiled from my city—for life—because of you?”

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”

“I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.”